


Marrow

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Harsh Realm
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:11:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clearly I remember when I used to scratch my poems on the backs of other lovers in the darkness of my mind, back before I made my home in the marrow of your bones--now I know your figure like my own even from behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marrow

When he holds his leg a certain way it starts to tingle. The tingling gets stronger until it's a deep-bone kind of vibration, a shiver, and then he can watch the muscles of his calf tightening out of his control as nerves fall asleep, until the entire lower leg is rigid, foot flexed, unmoving. Like a thing that doesn't even belong to him.

Sometimes when he wants to hurt in a different way he does that, watching it with detached fascination. He knows what it's like to look at part of you like it isn't part of you anymore, because it isn't.

He's doing it now not because he wants to hurt in a different way, but because he would welcome the opportunity now to feel anything. He's just drunk enough not to feel and not quite drunk enough for all the little sealed boxes of feeling to start floating to the surface of things and creak open. Mike Pinocchio never gets that drunk anymore. To do so is a liability and he can only have so many of those.

He has one right now, one liability, called so because it, he, is drunker than Mike is, drunk and as usual caring far less than he should about the wrong things and far more than he should about other wrong things. Not much just now, though, because he's dancing in the middle of the bar in a crowd of sweaty people whose names he doesn't know and never will and it doesn't matter anyway. Mike watches him and watches his leg go numb and tries to remember how to feel.

He doesn't remember his knife finding its way into his hand but there it is, shining in the light of gas lanterns, and he's scratching words into the scarred wood of the table. He's only half paying attention to what they are. The rest of his attention is on the shadows of moving hips, sometimes his and sometimes not, the lines of bodies, once or twice the flash of his eyes. He wonders if he's looking at him.

"Hobbes." He says it low and under his breath. No one could possibly hear it. He isn't trying to get the kid's attention. Sometimes he just likes the way his name feels in his mouth.

There's a lot he doesn't say.

They've been here too damn long. The kid is starting to lose it, starting to want to get lost. He never would have let himself get this far gone a few months ago.

_Hobbes._ Now that in itself is kind of a problem.

The knife moves in his hand and the point digs into the table, and he puts his leg down on the floor and picks it up again, twists it across his knee, watches it tighten. Movements all contained in his own body, in what he can touch. Hobbes's movements are wild, free, extending outside of himself. Mike raises his eyes into the dimness and watches him smile as a girl with her hair twisted up into knots puts her arms around his neck from behind and whispers something into his ear, her hips moving with his hips in something that isn't quite a dance anymore.

The knife digs a little deeper into the wood.

"Hey, handsome." It's not a voice he knows and he turns his head towards it, already irritable and ready to be more. He's wearing his best 'fuck the fuck off' aura but sometimes people just don't get it anyway. A woman, and she's not hideous, with long hair tied back high on her head and a leather top cut low, but he doesn't want that. "Dance with me." Her hand is resting on his arm. He looks down at her long, jagged fingernails with disgust.

"Not interested."

"Don't like girls?" Her face twists into a sneer.

"Don't like you."

"Fucker." Her hand leaves his arm and moves back like she's going to slap him, and then her eyes flicker to the knife in his hand and she stops, wavering. He looks up at her evenly. A fraction of a second and it could be in her gut, though that would probably be a bad idea. Not like any of this is exactly good.

"Fucker," she says again, and steps back. Her lipstick is smeared. Here, he fucks women, but he doesn't like them, and he thinks maybe a lot of that is all the fucking makeup, painted on like a goddamn doll. Like it all needs to be any less real.

They paint it on to hide their cracks. Everyone here is walking around broken.

He turns his attention back to the knife and the music swells and it's like she doesn't even exist anymore. He looks down at what he's scratched into the wood.

_even the smoke gets into your bones_

He looks at it for a while, trying to figure out where it came from and what it means, and because his leg is going to sleep again he almost doesn't feel the light touch on his arm. When he does the blade of the knife comes out of the table with a slight jerk and he's pointing it at Hobbes's midsection.

Hobbes tilts his head on one side and smiles. Maybe he's too drunk to be afraid. Maybe he's just not, right now. "What's that for?"

He flicks the knife away and his eyes follow. "Nothing."

Hobbes says something else. He can't hear him over the music. Hobbes leans closer and he smells like sweat and cheap whiskey and some girl's bad perfume and suddenly Mike wants to punch him in the mouth, knock him down and shake him and ask him what the hell happened to him. But he knows. He knows. On some level he knew this would happen. Maybe on some level he wanted it.

Beautiful boy can't stay beautiful forever, not in the Realm. Once, when going into a dive bar divier than this, someone he knew caught him by the shoulder.

_Hey, Pinocchio. Who's the twink?_

The guy had found a couple of his teeth, after. Not like it mattered.

"You didn't dance with her." Hobbes is leaning close and his lips are brushing against Mike's ear, and Mike's lips are almost brushing his. "Why not?"

_Because I left my dancing feet in the Real World. One of them in particular._ Something flares in him and he reaches out and grips Hobbes's wrist. There's a soft gasp in his ear. He likes it.

"Didn't feel like it."

One of the gas lanterns flares and burns out, and somewhere between the dimness and the dimmer dimness Hobbes's hand flashes out and grips his wrist right back, the one holding the knife. Maybe not so drunk after all. Sweat and whiskey and perfume. Flex. Hold.

"I saw you watching me."

He turns his head and his teeth graze over Hobbes's earlobe, not quite a bite, not a kiss. He doesn't really know where this is coming from. Tingle. Flex. "So what if I was?"

The hand at his wrist tugs him, knife and all. Hobbes is laughing and his eyes are sparkling in what light there is. His cheeks are flushed. "Dance with me."

Left his dancing feet somewhere else, but he's still letting Hobbes pull him up and onto them, the knife slipping somehow back into its sheath. As he steps forward he sleeping leg wakes up and sends shivers up the bone, curling and spiraling. It makes him laugh and Hobbes shakes his head as he leads Mike backwards into the crowd of surging, trembling people, lips split into a grin and his eyes shining with alcohol and low light. Beautiful boy can't stay beautiful forever. Except maybe in places like this he can.

We age in two directions. We get older and younger, both at once. Time itself is parallel. _Kid, with you I could be sixteen again._

When they dance they don't touch in the beginning, turning around each other, almost circling, almost wary. There's something tight in the air like a fight, like a taut muscle, and one move could make it snap into blows. Mike drifts away for a while, watches Hobbes through moving bodies, feels something rising in him for which he has no name. But the music also rises around them and acts like a net, slowly drawing them close and closer together and the people between them seem to melt away.

The first contact is brief, fleeting, just a brush of a hand and a hip, and then it sets something else off, something wakes up, and they're pressed hard together and Mike's nose is full of sweat and whiskey and perfume. His hands are on Hobbes's hips and moving them together, and when their mouths find each other it seems like the natural next step in a single, natural progression. It gets into everything sooner or later. The smoke gets into your bones.

Hobbes pulls away and curls a hand around the back of his neck, leans in. His lips brush Hobbes's ear and Hobbes's lips brush his and this time he doesn't spare the teeth. And the music rises.

Flex. Hold.

A few months ago this would never have happened. A few months ago maybe neither of them wanted to get lost like this. Mike's hands are still on Hobbes's hips when he pushes him against the wall in the back of the room. The pale, sickly light of the lanterns doesn't extend this far and they're in thick dimness, thick smoke and something else thick, heavy and hot in his hand when he yanks zipper down and slips inside. Hobbes curses sharply under his breath and bucks against him. Hold.

Maybe neither of them were ever drunk enough.

"OhGod_fuck,_" Hobbes moans and when Mike sinks down onto his knees he doesn't notice that the floor is filthy with trash and bottles and the old sweat of a hundred other nights like this one. There's no more whiskey and perfume now, just the taste of him and the way he flexes and tightens under Mike's mouth and hands, and the way he can somehow hear him whimpering over the thud of the music when Mike pulls back and grips him hard in one hand and snarls _You're mine, mine, you fucking get that_ like it actually means anything.

He can tell he's coming the second before it starts, can tell by the way he clenches and stays clenched, arching up against him, and he takes him deep as it happens, wanting to finish him fast, part of him wanting to just swallow him whole, alive, keep him there. He tastes a flash of something hot and slick and sharp and he swallows that instead. Hobbes is still shaking under his hands but suddenly that doesn't seem like it's part of anything anymore. He rolls up off his knees in one movement and Hobbes starts to slump forward against him, breathing like a long-distance runner, but Mike shoves him back.

It's not part of anything.

"You said." He hears it over the bass as he turns his back, strangely childish, sounding at the same time hurt and demanding. "You _said._"

_I say a lot of things._

He doesn't look back as the people part for him and close behind him like water. He can still feel accusing eyes on his back, following him until he's out and into the blessedly cool night.

He could just leave. He was always kind of figuring he would and this would be as good a time as any. He could just fucking go, get the car and drive away and forget this ever happened. Let the kid figure himself out on his own, let him keep his damned complications to himself. Good idea, really. He gets the car.

And he sits in it, outside the sad-looking shack that calls itself a bar on certain nights, waiting until he comes out, shoulders slumped like he's been in a fight and come out the wrong side of it. He stops by the car and stands there for a few seconds, until Mike leans over and swings the passenger door open.

"Get the fuck in."

"Why should I?" The voice isn't childish anymore, isn't surly. It's honestly wondering.

He almost laughs. "Because I said so."

So he does.

And if we age in two directions maybe time doesn't even mean anything.

They drive for hours. Once upon a time those streetlights over their heads were lit and they would have been bathed in streaks of orange glow. Except not, even, because a day after this place was born it was dying. There was a day of streetlights and supermarkets and kids screaming at recess and mothers in SUVs and heroin addicts in alleyways and children dying in the dust in countries no one ever thought about, until a day after when that was everywhere.

There is no orange glow. There are the occasional flares of fires, some in buildings and some not. Mike presses his foot against the gas and feels very clearly how it's being controlled from a central location somewhere over his neck. He is in his body. He is not of his body.

"You said." When Hobbes says it it's like what he said when he left the bar, quiet and cold. Not a shred of childishness in it. He almost wishes for some; it might make this all hurt a little less.

"That's not what you want."

Hobbes is fumbling at the doorhandle and instead of reaching across and stopping him, Mike is stopping the car, moving from gas to brake. When it stops Hobbes shoves the door open and lunges out into a night where a chilly, oily rain is beginning to fall. Mike looks after him for a moment and notices that they're on the edge of what used to be a city park. Now it's a junkyard, full of half-burned and broken furniture, refrigerators with their doors hanging open, empty washing machines like gaping mouths. Among these Hobbes stumbles and almost falls and turns, his face wet from the rain, opening his mouth and screaming something Mike can't make out.

And Mike is out of the car even as he's reflexively rolling his eyes, leaving the door bouncing open after him, around the hood of the car and somehow managing not to trip and bleed on jagged glass and metal. Hobbes is closer than he had looked and when his arms close around him he doesn't remember reaching him.

Hobbes is shaking. Not like he was shaking at the bar. "I don't remember how I got here," he says, his voice still full of that horrible coldness, and Mike knows exactly what he's talking about.

"Doesn't matter now." His hands slide up Hobbes's arms and neck and hold his face between them, pressing damp forehead to damp forehead. He would lie and say that everything's going to be okay, if he wouldn't hate himself in the morning. Which he will be anyway. _Beautiful boy, stay beautiful for me, do that, I won't ask for anything else._

"Nothing does, it doesn't, it—-" Hobbes shakes his head free of Mike's grip and starts laughing, the most lost sound Mike thinks he's ever heard, and it isn't right. It was better when he was dancing. He should be dancing now. His arms are linked around Mike's neck and if he closes his eyes it almost feels like he is dancing again, and when he catches Hobbes's face in his hands again and catches his mouth with his own he doesn't taste the whiskey or the perfume anymore. Only the sweat, and something else that reminds him of somewhere clean and clear and kind, somewhere he's never been. He dives into it and Hobbes's hands hook into claws, digging in and pulling him closer, impossibly closer, moving across his back like he's writing something with his fingertips. If it was a message, who would it be for?

He said.

Even nerves can't stay asleep forever.


End file.
